Eighty-Five from the Archive: James Thurber

This year is The New Yorker’s eighty-fifth anniversary. To celebrate, over eighty-five weekdays we will turn a spotlight on a notable article, story, or poem from the magazine’s history. The issue containing that day’s selected piece will be made freely available in our digital archive and will remain open until the next day’s selection is posted.

Long before James Thurber was on the cover of Time and widely known as the greatest American humorist since Mark Twain, he was a not-so-young-and-aspiring writer who shared an office “the size of a hall bedroom” with another up-and-comer named E. B. White at a fledgling comic weekly edited by Harold Ross. Ross hired Thurber in 1927 under the mistaken impression that he and White were good friends (they would become so later). Thurber arrived at The New Yorker from Columbus, Ohio, via Paris, France, and a brief stint at the New York Evening Post. Ross intended him to be the “Jesus”—someone who would organize the chaos out of which the magazine was created each week. Thurber failed as an organizational mastermind, but soon joined Ross, White, Katharine Angell, and Wolcott Gibbs as one of the most important influences on the development of The New Yorker.

Six months after he was hired, Thurber was transferred to the Talk of the Town, where he found his feet as a reporter and did for that department what White did for Notes and Comment—he gave it an identity and a tone, which can still be heard in the magazine today. William Shawn called him one of the “inventors” of Talk, and Lillian Ross, in her introduction to the Talk anthology, “The Fun of It,” singled out Thurber, noting that he started the convention of using the first person plural in Talk stories: “We were fortunate enough to be seated a few rows behind Rachmaninoff the other night at the Plaza ball room,” Thurber wrote at the opening of “Music Makers,” a story about the Theremin. (Other Thurber Talk gems include “The Old Lady,” from 1927, and “The Frescoer,” from 1930.)

Thurber, of course, contributed much more than Talk to The New Yorker and is probably best remembered for his cartoons and his humor pieces. For both, he owed a debt to White. It was White who fished a selection of Thurber’s doodles out of the garbage and first showed them to the magazine’s art department, and it was White who helped Thurber develop his style as a humorist. In a 1994 Critic at Large piece, Adam Gopnik described how White’s example helped shape Thurber’s writing:

Once [Thurber] saw that you could get farther in the city by acting like the Columbus boy you had been all along, his competitive instincts kicked in: nobody was going to out-little-guy him, by God. He took over White’s shyness and his values and made them into a storytelling structure: the little man overwhelmed by life in New York. But White’s certainties helped tame Thurber’s egotism and got him to see the literary value of modesty. That set Thurber free to look at his own inner life without becoming, as he had been before and would be later, a bore on the page.

In the magazine’s obituary for Thurber, White recalled that Thurber’s “mind was never at rest, and his pencil was connected to his mind by the best conductive tissue I have ever seen in action.”

Thurber left The New Yorker’s staff in 1933, but continued contributing pieces until his death in 1961. In all, he published more than four hundred cartoons, nearly three hundred casuals and stories and several hundred Talk stories. He was cantankerous and unhappy later in life and, by his own admission, his best years “extended from the time Lindbergh flew the Atlantic to the day coffee was rationed” (that is, from 1927 to the beginning of the Second World War). During that period, he published the bulk of his best-known pieces, including “The Night the Bed Fell,” “Fables for Our Time,” “The Catbird Seat,” and “The Macbeth Murder Mystery.” Today we highlight “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” from the issue of March 18, 1939. In this passage, the meek and hen-pecked title character launches into one of his daydreams while running errands for his wife:

…“Perhaps this will refresh your memory.” The District Attorney suddenly thrust a heavy automatic at the quiet figure on the witness stand. “Have you ever seen this before?” Walter Mitty took the gun and examined it expertly. “This is my Webley-Vicker 50.80,” he said calmly. An excited buzz ran around the courtroom. The judge rapped for order. “You are a crack shot with any sort of firearms, I believe?” said the District Attorney, insinuatingly. “Objection!” shouted Mitty’s attorney. “We have shown that the defendant could not have fired that shot. We have shown that he wore his right arm in a sling on the night of the fourteenth of July.” Walter Mitty raised his hand briefly and the bickering attorneys were stilled. “With any known make of gun,” he said evenly, “I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand. Pandemonium broke loose in the courtroom. A woman’s scream rose above the bedlam and suddenly a lovely, dark-haired girl was in Mitty’s arms. The District Attorney struck at her savagely. Without rising from his chair, Mitty let the man have it on the point of his chin. “You miserable cur!”…

“Puppy biscuit,” said Walter Mitty. He stopped walking and the buildings of Waterbury rose up out of the misty courtroom and surrounded him again. A woman who was passing laughed. “He said ‘Puppy biscuit,’ “ she said to her companion. “That man said ‘Puppy biscuit’ to himself. Walter Mitty hurried on. He went into an A. & P., not the first one he had come to but a smaller one farther up the street. “I want some biscuit for small, young dogs,” he said to the clerk. “Any special brand, sir?” The greatest pistol shot in the world thought a moment. “It says ‘Puppies Bark for It’ on the box,” said Walter Mitty.